Mobile phones did not yet exist when in 1947 Gian Carlo Menotti (1911-2007) premiered The telephone, or l’amour à trois, a chamber opera with comic and satirical overtones in which a young man plans to propose to his girlfriend while she is eternally hooked on the phone talking about banalities with other people.
Visionary, the Italian composer, who was also a playwright, librettist, and director, and who emigrated to the United States as a young man, taking with him the verista lyricism of Puccini and the atonality of the second Viennese school, addressed a theme that a century later would affect a large part of of the population in the first world: nomophobia, the fear of being left without a mobile phone.
This story arrives today at the Peralada Festival in a production of the Bilbao Musika-Música Festival –here in its original English version–, with musical direction by Iván Martín –who directs the Galdós Ensemble from the piano– and in the voices of two young singers: the baritone from Barcelona Jan Antem, with a grant from the Ópera Actual Foundation, and the soprano from the Canary Islands Ruth González. Both glued to their smartphone.
The staging is by María Goiricelaya, winner of a Max for Yerma, who thus breaks into poetry. The Basque director turns the apartment in which the plot took place in the Broadway premiere into a current gym. She and she invites the public of Peralada to take photos with her cell phones during the performance.
“This is a comic, cynical and ironic piece about nomophobia and fading [disappear, stop showing interest] in the couple, which I have tried to take to an unconventional place,” he says. That moment in the gym that was supposed to be yours is now loaded with connectivity. Putting a couple to ignore each other in a gym seems to me representative of how I see the new generations ”.
For Ruth González it is also about the cult of the body, “because then it is exhibited in networks, a very current vicious circle.” And according to Jan Antem, it is a title to bring opera closer to young audiences. The story is recognizable, the score is beautiful, with lyrical sounds, and sometimes close to the musical. In fact, Iván Martín indicates that in Menotti Stravinsky can be heard with hints of French music, “since he knows how to absorb all the currents that coexisted in Europe a century ago”.